Chapter 1
Centerville, Nebraska
He supposed that this was coming.
Rafael Antonio de la Varga leaned backwards sharply as Jeremy Pack attempted a wild hooking haymaker. He kept his hands squarely behind his back, his knees bent, his body loose as he evaded the heavy blow, a blow that would have caught many of the younger boys whom Jeremy bullied flat-footed. There had been no warning the punch was coming outside of Jeremy’s fast approach across the campus of Centerville High. After all, this was Jeremy’s last chance to finally “put the fuckin’ mexi-cunt in his place.” This was the last day of school for both Jeremy and Rafael, and after today, Jeremy would follow in the tradition of his parents and live on the public dole while building a criminal record, and Rafael would move on to bigger and better things, leave Nebraska far, far behind.
This was Jeremy’s last chance to beat him up and have it attributed to a schoolyard fight, instead of felony assault, and this had been a long time coming. Pack had hated him the first day he came to Centerville because he was so different than everyone else, and boys like Jeremy Pack singled out anyone different from themselves for abuse. Where they had fair skin or healthy tans, Rafael had the Spaniard’s dark complexion and thick black hair. Where they spoke their mid-western accented English, he had come to Centerville barely speaking any English at all, just a year’s worth of English classes in high school. Where Jeremy was built like a fire plug, stocky and pudgy, Rafael was tall and lithe, athletic, built like a panther. And where they had their brown or blue eyes, Rafael’s eyes were a luminous, almost glowing yellow, which was an oddity even in Spain. And from that first day, Rafael set the stage for this confrontation, for he ignored Jeremy Pack in a way that drove the dull-witted young man absolutelyinsane. Pack was simply below his notice, and he neither rose to Pack’s bait nor even dignified his taunts with a response. He simply walked by, walked away, not responding in any way unless Pack tried to get physical. It was then that he acted, but not aggressively, instead using his athletic gifts to evade or avoid Pack’s attempts to physically taunt him, and often doing so in a way that made Pack look like a complete idiot. The very first time Pack tried it, he ended up on his face when his attempt to push Rafael met with nothing but empty air. Expecting to make contact and push hard, Pack instead fell flat on his face when Rafael sidestepped the clumsy attempt as easily as he might have opened a cabinet door, and Pack had nothing to push against.
There had been other attempts to bully Rafael into fights, but always before he managed to avoid a physical confrontation, mainly by simply staying away from Jeremy Pack. Pack was in none of his classes, and Pack was on the football team where Rafaelhad been on the soccer and baseball teams. Pack went out and caroused with his friends and engaged in petty crime, getting arrested almost once a month, where Rafael preferred to sit on the back porch of his aunt’s house and play his guitar well into the night, dreaming of the beautiful blue sea and the rugged wooded hills and rocky shores of home. He also knew that Pack stood absolutely no chance against him in a fight. There was no real honor in beating down a defenseless fool who knew no better, could not control his base nature any more than a dog could control its impulse to bark at strangers, and unlike Americans with their egos, Rafael didn’t care what others thought about him because he wouldn’t rise to Pack’s bait and fight him. Many thought he was a coward, but he honestly didn’t care. He knew that he could beat Pack in a fight, and beat him badly, and that was enough for him. He had nothing to prove to any of these people, because in just three days, he would leave Centerville and never come back.
Pack made several more clumsy attempts to punch him, which Rafael avoided with ridiculous ease, the thick, homely boy’s arms moving like he was in slow motion. The tall Spaniard kept his hands squarely behind his back, holding his own wrists as he weaved and dodged, his feet moving lightly under him and always in motion where Pack squared his feet as if he were about to chop down a tree. Rafael’s gold eyes watched everything Pack did, from the set of his shoulders to the rotation of his torso, from the movements of his arms to the set of his knees, using all those visual cues to guess what Pack was about to do before he even started it. Those skills were learned in boxing and fencing back home in Spain, sports that made him quite slippery in a fight, allowed him to see what his opponent would do by studying the movements of his body. That allowed him to weave around Pack like he was a toddler, making him look absolutely ridiculous, and silencing the many cheering teenagers that had gathered around to cheer on their hometown football player over the outsider. They had never seen Rafael do anything like that before. They knew he was a really good soccer and baseball player, good enough to win Centerville the single A soccer state tournament and get drafted by the Cincinnati Reds major league baseball club right out of high school, but they had never seen him fight, because he had never reduced himself to that level before. Even now, he refused to fight, but he did so in a way that made Pack look not just clumsy, but ridiculous, and Pack’s fury rose with every missed blow and evaded attempt to tackle or grapple the slippery Spaniard. Pack started to pant as he tired himself out with his missed swings and failed lunges, the last of which put him on his face on the grass when Rafael slithered aside with light feet. He rolled up and moved to stand up, but a teacher’s voice boomed across the campus lawn, silencing all the cheers.
“What the hell is going on!” Coach Hart snapped as he bulled students out of his way. Hart was the football coach, and since Pack had been on the football team for his senior season, Pack knew him very well.
“This fuckin’ mexi blindsided me, Coach!” Pack said from the ground, rolling over on his hip and looking up, pointing at Rafael.
“For the last time, Pack, I am from Spain,” Rafael said in his thickly accented English. “Not Mexico. Spain.”
“Shut your fuckin’ cunthole, you fuckwad!” Pack snapped as he rolled up and to his feet. “You hit me from behind!”
“I never touched you. My hands have never come out from behind my back,” Rafael replied calmly, pulling his hands out to each side, then returning them behind his back to grasp his wrists once again. “And since you are the one who is sweating and out of breath, does that not presume that you are the one that has been doing all the fighting?”
Hart gave Rafael an assessing look, then looked down at his former player. “Well, I guess I could haul both of you to the principal’s office, but since this is the last day of school for the senior class, there really isn’t much point. But, if I hear of any further scrapping between you two, I’ll call the police and let them sort it out. Got it, Pack?”
Pack’s face flushed red and he glared at his former coach. “I got it, Coach.”
“Good. Now go inside. Don’t come out of the cafeteria until after lunch.”
Rafael turned and started walking away, as he always did, his hands behind his back under his backpack and his stride slow, easy, almost lazy, as if what happened was nothing less than a mild delay on his afternoon stroll. And that never failed to enrage Pack even more, that Rafael completely dismissed these little incidents as soon as they were over, that Jeremy Pack was nothing to Rafael de la Varga. The bully was not feared by his intended victim. He wasn’t even given any attention.
Satisfied that Pack’s last chance to beat him up had been defused, he returned to his musings as he took his usual lunchtime walk around the campus, something of a ritual for him. Since he never ate lunch, the lunch period was a time to do homework and enjoy the warm early summer breeze. It was always so cold here. Rafael was from Spain, from a small coastal town named A Guarda, literally right across the mouth of the river from Portugal, where the weather was warm almost all the time and the smell of the sea was constantly in one’s nose as the wind blew in off the Atlantic. Spain’s climate there was much like northern Florida’s, warm summers, very mild winters, somewhat humid along the coast,and with consistent rains that tapered in the summer, which was their dry season. The land was much different as well. At home, the land was rugged, hilly, with woods and forests that came all the way down the hills and almost right up to the rocky shores of the Atlantic, with many small household gardens and farmland that contoured around those hills. Here, it was nothing but corn fields and flat land, but he could admit that there were some woods to the north, and a few small hills…just not in Centerville. Other parts of America were very pretty, but it was his curse that he was placed…here. It was as radically different from home as Rafael felt it could get. There was no warm winter here, no salt smell in the air, because this cursed place was about as far from the ocean as it could get. The sea was thousands of kilometers away in every direction, and that more than anything had been the hardest thing for him to reconcile when he was sent here after his mother was killed in the fire that destroyed their house while he was at school, sent to his last surviving relative, his aunt Consuela…or Connie as she called herself here.
Two years ago. It almost seemed like a lifetime ago, him landing at the airport in Omaha, the closest city with a large airport, when it was below zero degrees Celsius and he walked out into the terminal with nothing but a suitcase full of donated clothes and wearing a tee shirt, a windbreaker, and a pair of light slacks…the heaviest clothes he’d owned at the time. He had lost everything in the fire, not just his mother, but also all his clothes, all his possessions, leaving him orphaned and destitute. They’d had to take him to a store to buy him a heavy coat and shoes, and he spent the entire winter both shivering with the cold and mourning the loss of his beloved mother. She had been the only relative he’d ever known, for his grandparents had passed away before he was born and his mother’s only sibling lived in America. His father…he’d never known his father. His mother had only told him that he was a good and kind man that had died before he was born, but did say that the necklace that Rafael wore, a simple gold chain with a medallion with an unusual sunburst design, had been his father’s. She wouldn’t even tell him his father’s last name, just that his first name was Eduardo, and when she died, that information had died with her. He had come here with nothing but three changes of clothes donated to him by the relief agency, none of which were suitable for the bitterly cold winter, 30 euros in his pocket, and speaking less English than an American toddler commanded. If not that his aunt Consuela spoke the languages of her hometown, Galician—what they locally called Galego—and Spanish—what they called Castilian, he would have been almost cut adrift in this bastion of America-ness, where thinking in any way other than a patriotic American was heavily discouraged…and Americans spoke English.
He remembered his first few days of school, trying to keep up when nobody spoke a language he understood. They’d thought he was stupid because he couldn’t speak or read English, so arrogant in their belief that just because he didn’t speak their language that he wasn’t educated or intelligent. After all, he spoke three languages at that time—four now that he’d learned English—because in most of Europe, if you didn’t speak at least two languages, you couldn’t really function. In most of Europe, one spoke the local language of one’s home town and also the “official” language of one’s country, and they were very often not the same. In his home town of A Guarda, the local language was known as Galician to most outside the province, but what they called Galego at home, and the official language of Spain was naturally Spanish, which they called Castilian at home, so one needed to be fluent in both Galician and Castilian Spanish to function effectively in his home town. Galician was mainly spoken, but since most of the TV and radio channels were in Spanish, and all government business was conducted in Spanish, knowing Spanish was all but necessary. Since he lived literally across the river from Portugal, he had learned the minor differences between Galician and Portuguese to understand pure Portuguese, but the truth was, the languages were so similar that someone who spoke Galician could understand a good three quarters or more of what someone was saying in Portuguese. Since he’d gone out of his way to learn the differences between Galician and Portuguese, he could confidently state that he was also fluent in Portuguese. Galician was actually a branch language of Portuguese instead of Spanish, spoken in the northern coastal region of Spain, which was known as the autonomous community of Galicia. But it was different enough to be its own language, so knowing Portuguese wasn’t a bad idea to speak to the Portuguese on the other side of the river so those little differences didn’t lead to a misunderstanding. It was also useful because they also got some radio and TV stations from Portugal in A Guarda, and it was nice to know all of what they were saying. If one didn’t speak Spanish andeither Galicianor Portuguese in his village, one wouldn’t be able to communicatecompletely with all the village residents and enjoy all the available entertainment options that the village’s location had to offer.
Rafael had learned Galician and Spanish from his mother and in school, as they werethe “official” languages of the town of A Guarda, but had learned the rest of Portuguesethrough self-study and from his friends that lived around his house and in school that had come from across the river. He’d taken a whole year and a half of English in school before the fire, was starting his second semester of his second year when he was forced to move. His school had offered five different foreign languages; English, French, Basque, German, and Catalan, but he could only take one, so he chose English. In Europe, English and German were very useful languages to know because they were much more widespread than the more local languages offered, Basque, French, and Catalan. Basque and Catalan were regional languages in Spain and southern France, where French was mainly only spoken in France and Monaco, but was also spoken by many of the more educated and socially erudite Europeans. German was a very widely spoken language through several European nations, and English was something of a universal language in most airports, as well as a popular alternate language for people to speak. He’d had to choose between them, so he chose English because there was a girl in the English class that he rather liked.
Funny how an impulsive decision based on getting into the same class as a pretty girl became critical just a year and a half later. Without that basic knowledge of English, he might still be completely lost outside his aunt’s house.
It had been a long two years living here, in the cold, away from the sea and the wooded hills and the salt breezes, torn from the only life he had ever known and thrown into an alien culture in a God-forsaken landlocked flat plain that was nothing but cornfields in the summer and snow in the winter, but at least he had found solace in sports. He may have been disliked because he was an outsider in this tiny town, but his coaches loved him. Simply put, Rafael was a born athlete. There was no sport that he could not play, and play better than anyone else, after barely any coaching and instruction. If it involved hand-eye coordination or body control, Rafael could do it with minimal practice, and got better and better the more he practiced. Before the fire back home, he had had a whole bookshelf full of trophies from various sports, from popular ones like football, tennis, volleyball, boxing, and basketball to more Spanish-oriented sports, like fencing, water polo, handball, and standard polo. Fencing and polo both were very popular in A Guarda, throwbacks to Spain’s rich medieval history, and handball was played as often as basketball in the school gym. After he understood the rules and the strategy of a game and practiced the basic mechanics required for his body, he could perform at a level that left everyone else far behind. He knew he could have beaten Jeremy Pack into a pulp because he was three times stronger than virtually anyone else in school, even over the American football players that did weightlifting, a ratio that was highly unusual for someone not a weightlifter himself, and with that proportional strength throughout his entire body that was entirely natural. Rafael didn’t lift weights, but he had the strength of an athlete that did. That strength gave him an incredible vertical jump, quick feet and very fast running speed, and tremendous power when he swung a baseball bat, but most critically, it gave him, hands down, the hardest fastball in the state of Nebraska. He was the only high school pitcher in the state of Nebraska that had ever thrown a 100 mile an hour fastball.